Reception for immigrant and refugee young people

Adele Rice.

Adele Rice, head teacher of Brisbane's Milperra High School, an intensive English language preparation centre, tells of the terrible impacts their experiences have had on many of her students who have come from countries in conflict.

Created:

2005

Date Added:

01 May 2006

Source:

Adele Rice interviewed by Andrew Jakubowicz for MMA. Artwork: Students of Milperra High School, Brisbane

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

9.3 MB

Length:

4 min 01 s

Transcript

Adele Rice

Head
teacher, Milperra
High School, Brisbane

Artwork: by students at
Milperra High School

Brisbane - reception for
immigrant and refugee young people

I’m Adele Rice.
I’m the principal of the Milperra School…

It is an
intensive English language preparation centre, like a reception centre for
receiving and welcoming immigrant and refugee young people…

There’d always
been the idea that newcomers to this country needed English classes, so the
idea that language is part of settlement has always been a strength of the
Australian immigration program…

With the
Vietnamese students that I had, even though that country was at war, there
weren’t so many children who had directly experienced that guerrilla kind of
war. It was more their parents who had suffered the education camps. But for
the Bosnian kids, for the first time, it was a period when I couldn’t look at
television and so on. I’d see everybody looked like the kids at school…

I was quite
happy to be a Queenslander and happy to be someone who lived in Brisbane
because we had a lord mayor at the time, so at local government level, the
temporary protection visa holders were welcomed in Brisbane, and at no time did
the education department say we weren’t able to educate them, although we did
that without any Commonwealth funding for the first few years. And it was
another just remarkable time because they didn’t have parents at all, and I
suppose our school community and the Brisbane community closed around them…

And we had
suddenly turned that into a crime, that to seek asylum was not a legal thing to
do. I also think it’s ironic that so long after the event, everyone of those
people that I know on a temporary protection visa has been granted permanency.
So it seemed then that that suffering was in vain…

Telling you what
torture is and what trauma is. And if it’s systematic destruction of self and
systematic destruction of hope, then I felt that’s what we were doing, or
that’s what was being done in our name…

They were told
continuously - “you’re not wanted here”. They were continuously woken in the
night, summonsed as if they were going to leave and then told that they weren’t
leaving. The suffering of the Iraqi and the Afghani people, the mental torture
I think was horrific…

At my school
probably the refugee population is two-thirds of the total school population,
and within that I suppose two-thirds again would be from Africa. And many are
from the Sudan but there’s increasing numbers from Liberia. We’ve had bigger
intakes of Somalians, Ethiopians before, but that’s starting to emerge again,
and significant numbers now from Rwanda and Burundi and so on. And they’re
amongst the sickest and the smallest children that I’ve ever seen. But the
thing that really, really, I suppose.. it’s quite heartbreaking, is the age.
They’re sixteen, fifteen and over, many of them, but their educational
knowledge and experience is so minimal – it wouldn’t even be the same as a five
or six year old child here. And yet they’re very gifted in lots of things,
particularly oral language…

Because in the
Sudan people weren’t educated beyond the age of thirteen, and girls often
weren’t educated at all. And places they came from had no sealed road or
schools – they’ve never seen a library. So you can’t come from that background
into our twenty-first century, with the technology and the so-called smart
state, without some incredibly in-depth catch-up sort of period.